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A Liberating League

Rebecca Lepkoff doesn’t regret attending events hosted by the Young Communist League when she was a modern dancer and street photographer living on the Lower East Side.

“They would give parties and have food and cigarettes and whatnot,” said Ms. Lepkoff, now 95. “And I would go! I mean, why not? It was open, and I would come home with a pack of cigarettes, you know?”

Not that she remembers signing anything incriminating, she said, sitting in her Harlem apartment recently. “Nobody bothered me,” she said. “I never signed anything. Did I sign anything?” She laughed. “I wonder if I ever signed anything.”

Although there are no official records, there were thought to be at least 100 women who were closely involved, if not full members, of the league — among them, Lisette Model, who later taught Diane Arbus and Larry Fink, and Berenice Abbott. The league, which started in 1936 and disbanded in 1951 — a few years after the United States attorney general placed the league on a list of subversive groups, was a rare entity at the time.

A New Photography

In 2001, the Columbus Museum of Art acquired 170 vintage prints by members of the Photo League. Those prints, with some from a collection at the Jewish Museum, became “The Radical Camera,” a sweeping exhibition that closes in New York on March 25.

“We really wanted to not just present the work – because so much of it has been eclipsed by the politics of the day – but also we wanted to say something about it,” said Catherine Evans, the curator of photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, where the show will move in April. “And one of the things that I think was a revelation was how many women participated.”

Despite the political cloud hanging over the Photo League’s legacy, Ms. Lepkoff’s photographic motives were simple. “I lived on the Lower East Side, and everything was right there when you walked out on the street,” she said.

She captured fruit vendors, children at play, “fancy-shoed” mothers, luncheonettes. They were the scenes that inspired her to take the pictures included in her 2006 book, “Life on the Lower East Side,” and which are also on exhibit at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They were documentary. And they were very much Photo League in style.

Rebecca Lepkoff, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery14th Street. 1948.

While the Jewish Museum exhibition is not meant to be a comprehensive look at the league, it is meant to open dialogue about how, exactly, this sort of thing was possible at a time when photography was not seen as a fine art, but was predominantly focused on studio portraiture, fashion and commercial work.

“The 35-millimeter camera allowed women to find themselves in a field of art that was accessible, and it could really have an imprint and an influence,” said Mason Klein, curator at the Jewish Museum.

Ms. Evans saw it as more “democratic.” In the book “The Radical Camera,” she wrote about four Photo League women: Vivian Cherry, Sonia Handelman Meyer, Rae Russel and Lucy Ashjian, who was one of the League’s earlier members but has largely been disregarded over the years.

Their work is far from cohesive. And while some of the women’s images do have a feminine touch, “if we were to cover up the wall labels in that exhibition, you’d be hard-pressed to say, ‘That was by a woman; that was by a man,'” Ms. Evans said.

In her view, the women of the Photo League exhibited a sort of protofeminism. Some, like Ms. Abbott, were outspoken; others, reserved. Of those with whom Ms. Evans has spoken, “there didn’t seem to be that kind of motivation or that awareness that they were doing groundbreaking work.”

When Ms. Handelman Meyer joined the league in 1943, she took Sid Grossman’s workshop, where were plenty of women in the class. But she wondered if things might have been different had she worked harder to have her work shown or published. (She took a portfolio to Life magazine once but never returned.) “If I had done that, I would have noticed differences in the treatment of women,” said Ms. Handelman Meyer, 91. “Because I’m sure — I know — that women had a harder time getting their work shown and bought.”

But Ms. Cherry, also 91, worked for a number of magazines — “I practically worked for most of them,” she said. Like Ms. Lepkoff, she was a dancer, performing on Broadway in productions like “Showboat.” She eventually headed out onto the street with a camera a friend gave her as a gift.

Ms. Cherry was drawn to the Photo League because the work of its members tended to avoid the soft-focused, painterly style of the day. “I was in a fantasy world when I was a dancer,” she said. “And this was reality. And so much was going on in that period. And I wanted to be part of it.”

She was interested New York’s poorer neighborhoods. “Maybe I identified with them more,” she said. And she wanted to tell a story. She recalls the shock she felt when she came upon the scene of her 1947 photograph “Playing Lynched” (Slide 8). “The interesting thing about it was that this was in East Harlem,” she said. “And it wasn’t only black kids. They interchanged parts.”

Ms. Handelman Meyer, too, spent a lot of time in Harlem, where friends of hers had a darkroom. For a shy young woman, she said, photography took courage. More than once, she was stopped by the police, told that it wasn’t safe to wander by herself with her camera.

“But it was such a liberating thing, and to discover the city that you’ve lived in your whole life — it was a wonderful experience,” she said over the phone from Charlotte, N.C., where she now lives.

“I never had a moment’s trouble,” she added. “Never.”

She was inspired by the city and its people — “their faces, their attitudes, their business,” she said. “Just the way they lived was so important, it seemed to me. It was so important for me to understand them and for me to show them to other people to understand. I must say there was nothing intellectual or soul-searching about it when I did it. I don’t think I even thought any of these things when I was shooting. I was just enjoying myself.”

But while she describes her younger self as a political and radical person, she doesn’t recall thinking along those lines when she was shooting. Nor does she recall any major discussion of politics in workshops. “It was a question of doing good photography and a question of how you felt about what you were shooting; what you saw in what you were shooting,” she said. “There was nothing political about it.”